Looking Back and Forth across the Big Pond

Abstract

At first glance, the two books under review here seem well suited to each other. Wlademar Zacharasiewicz’s Images of Germany in American Literature (2007) is an exhaustive analysis of how American literature presented Germany and the Germans to American readers from the late nineteenth century to the present. (The introduction promises a companion volume for the period from 1815 onward, but the present volume already contains a chapter on the early nineteenth century.) Other Witnesses: An Anthology of Literature of the German Americans, 1850–1914 (2007), edited by Cora Lee Kluge, is an attempt to expand the category, “American Literature,” by arguing for the inclusion of German–American literature and presenting a selection of texts written by some of the nearly six million Germans who migrated to the US during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Unfortunately, there is almost no explicit overlap, so this review will first deal with the works separately and then, about half way through, speculate about how and why one could make connections between the two volumes. Despite its lack of a subtitle, an almost unheard of omission in the world of academic publishing, Zacharasiewicz’s volume turns out to be a fairly conventional survey of the ways in which Americans have portrayed Germany and the Germans in literature and, to a lesser degree, in films, television programs, and other visual images. However, the book at first seems to make up for doing the obvious by doing it thoroughly. Zacharasiewicz has read enormously, widely enough indeed to include, for example, the early-nineteenth-century author, George Tucker (1775–1861), whose extremely obscure novels divided “the complex image of